Cartoon courtesy of Cathy Wilcox
IMMIGRATION – A NOXIOUS MIX OF FEARS, PREJUDICES AND INCONSISTENCIES
(everything old is new again and again and again)
Let’s start by acknowledging that immigration has been good for Australia (if not for our Indigenous peoples).
Without immigration Australia would be a poorer place both economically and culturally. Without immigration we’d still be tea drinkers, meat and three veg for dinner eaters and culturally insulated from the rest of the world. Our economy would be smaller and our living standards lower.
After WWII Australia adopted a ‘populate or perish policy’. This policy aimed to attract nine Anglo Saxons for every European arrival. It failed. Over 50% of the million and a half of our New Australians came from Italy, Greece, Holland, Germany, Poland, Malta, ‘the beautiful Balts’ (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) and elsewhere. They helped build the Snowy Scheme, built our homes and infrastructure and expanded our cultural horizons. Nowhere was their impact more obvious than in our food habits. Over time we became coffee drinkers (then coffee nuts), we started eating pastas, pizzas, Weiner schnitzel, muesli, yoghurt, cheeses, breads other than white, bagels, fondu, Mediterranean salads – and drinkers of table wines.
The next wave of mass immigration was from Asia, most noticeably from South Vietnam, the country we fought alongside America to save, the war we lost. Australia has a long, long history of paranoia about being swamped by “the yellow peril”. This was the first time an Asian peoples arrived here en masse. After initial reservations from Aussies these New Australian also found their niche. Again, food proved a bridge that connected two diverse cultures, a bridge that helped allay suspicions and counter negative racial stereotypes. Vietnamese restaurants and take aways triggered an interest in their ‘balance of five tastes’ approach to recipes fresh ingredients and minimal cooking. Thai food played a similar function. Food brings people together. That’s how most of us first came into contact and learnt about Chinese Australians. It’s arguable we more easily learn about each other by pleasuring our stomachs than by studying the cultures, religions and ideologies of those we’re unfamiliar with.After the (predominantly Buddhist)Vietnamese came the escapees from an active civil war in Lebanon. This diaspora faced a harder time, a less than warm welcome. Arabs have always suffered from bad press (ie. negative stereotyping) in Australia. The reasons for this are historical and too complex to cover here.
The important thing to note is the ‘image’ of immigrants from the Middle East deteriorated over time. It was bad in 2016, the time of the Cronulla Riots. It became worse over the next decade.Muslims are now regarded with greater suspicion than any other immigrant group in Australia. Whether such suspicion is justified, or paranoia, is a moot point that should be rationally debated. Regardless of the facts, the media’s always sensational coverage of events such as attacks on New York Twin Tower (9/11), Bali, the London Underground (7/7), The Iraq and Afghan Wars, ‘Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and Bondi December 14, 2025 – plus the current near hysteria about ‘ISIS brides’ – has positioned Muslims (including Australian Muslims) as the whipping boys in the current immigration debate.
And there’s more than a touch of irony in that.
In reality Israel has long been the aggressor in Palestine, the nation which has forcibly dispossessed Muslims of their land and been prepared to kill to achieve that goal ‘from the sea to Jordan will be under Jewish sovereignty’ has been a Likud chant for decades yet, in Australia, the Jewish diaspora has, (in spite of its endorsement of everything Israel does), successfully positioned itself as the unfairly done by, innocent martyrs, the blameless who’ve committed no sin, those who must be protected by the Australian state.
It’s the reverse for Muslims.
Most of the world’s nations, the UN and International Courts classify Gazan/Palestinians as the victims in this long-term struggle that goes way back to WWI. It’s the Palestinians who have been forced off their land. Israel has been accused of committing genocide. Yet, in Australia, Muslims, Gazan, Palestinians (and Arabs in general) have been positioned as bad guys in this ongoing struggle, those who should be policed and prevented from vilifying and upsetting Jews by holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations and chanting ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ (which is essentially the same objective as expressed in the Likud statement quoted above).Jewish/Muslim frictions have become an open wound in Australian society and helped spread a bitter ‘us’ vs ‘them’ style of public discourse, a divisive style, a style that’s raising ‘doubts’ about, and causing anxiety among, more recent immigrant arrivals from countries as Somalia, Sudan and India.
The result?
Racial divisions and sensitivities are again intruding into – and distorting – our national debate on Immigration.
This is a reversal of a hard-earned trend toward mutually respectful multiculturalism. We are at risk of emotionalism and racial prejudice running rampant.How can we get our immigration policy back on track? The starting point for doing that is to be clear about our objectives.
WHAT IMMIGRATION POLICY DO WE NEED?
There are three key components. Success in all three areas is a prerequisite for reaching anywhere near the ideal. A good immigration policy must be of economic benefit to the country, promote domestic harmony/multiculturalism and recognise our humanitarian responsibilities toward those in mortal danger.
Let’s address each of these goals one at a time, starting with economics.
Australia needs immigrants if we are to maintain our existing standard of living. We definitely need immigration if we are to lift our standard of living. Without immigration our economy will go backwards.
Here’s why.
Because our population is aging (and our birth rate-at 1.48 – is below replacement levels) our population will shrink without migration. That means the number of young Australians paying taxes to support a growing retired population will shrink without migration. This (in spite of wealth transfers between generations) will place increasing burdens on a smaller work force and on middle income earners in particular. The country needs more young workers.
Australia needs more immigrants to do the jobs we don’t have enough people to do and/or the jobs Australians don’t want to do.
We need nurses, medical technicians and carers for our hospitals, aged care facilities and support services. We need doctors because we don’t train enough here. Without immigration our health system will deteriorate for all but the wealthy.
If we are to fix the supply problems we so obviously and painfully suffer from in housing and construction we need more tradespeople, labourers, construction workers, machine operators and engineers. Without these skills we have little chance of closing the supply gaps that are making it so hard for young people to buy a home and raise a family.
We need people with tech and hi-tech skills, modern and ‘future economy’ skills.
We need overseas university students to keep our 50+ universities afloat. The tuition fees our universities charge international students are high, we charge premium prices given that most overseas students come from countries with far lower per capita incomes than ours (China, India, Nepal, Philippines and Vietnam). Tuition fees for a three-year BA at Sydney University top AU$150,000+, for a seven-year Bachelor of Medicine tuition fees are around AU$650,000 mark…those figures are before accommodation and living expenses.None of these ‘needs’ should come as a surprise. They’ve been on the radar for years and years, decades in fact – and if you look at the Government’s immigration policy (see extract below) you’ll see it mentions most of the points raised above.
You’ll also notice while the ‘spin’, the words, are there, specific numbers and targets aren’t. There is no discussion of numbers (or how different mixes of skills and ethnicities within different industries) might impact on very real domestic problems such as our housing shortage, inadequate infrastructure, transport, education etc.
Immigration increases a country’s capacity to increase the supply of goods and services. It also increases demand in areas where supply is usually already under strain. We can hardly expect immigrants to bring their own tents, food, bathrooms, bicycles and medical supplies with them.
No serious policy maker can just look at immigration as a long-term solution to our supply problems without, at least, looking as to what demand pressures we’re likely to suffer in the short run. If our politicians close their eyes and wish away such unpleasant ‘side-effects’ (because they don’t like them or are clueless as to how to solve them), we’re in serious trouble.
Neither window dressing nor problem avoidance offer solutions to the problem of finding the right balance, the ‘sweet spot’ in immigration policy. All such approaches guarantee is that the problems we face eventually turn into crises which, in turn, trigger short term, band aid solutions that don’t fix things or please anyone.Immigration is too important an economic issue to treat in the cavalier manner our political class has done for decades.
AVOIDING DIVISIVENESS AT HOME & THE PROMOTION OF HARMONY
The second goal of immigration policy, at minimum, is to avoid adding to racial divisions within Australia.Racial tensions (and the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia in particular) have escalated largely because of religious fanaticism and how the war in Palestine has been conducted. The war that started in 2023 lit the fuse which stretched to Bondi and the Dec. 2025 massacre. We don’t need a $200 million Royal Commission to tell us that.
We also should already know that we can’t expect people (be they new arrivals or members of old Australian diasporas) who come from countries still in bloody conflict to have a cultural lobotomy as a precondition to enter – or remain – living in Australia. Humans don’t work that way.
NOTICE TO IMMIGRANTS
WELCOME TO YOUR NEW COUNTRY
Please note that before entering Australia through this gate you are required to place all your cultural baggage in the bin provided. You will be asked to sign an affidavit that you have complied with this request.
Thank you for your cooperation
The naivety behind this approach to keeping potential troublemakers from coming to our shores betrays a total lack of understanding of human nature. People can’t (nor do most want to) leave their pasts behind.
Australian Jews provide a perfect example of this reality.
Their story goes back to before their exodus from. Jews have lived through many good and bad times in many places and suffered the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust in WWII. They’ve created their own state to provide all Jews (no matter where in the world they come from) with a safe homeland which they’ve fiercely and successfully defend. Official Jewry in Australia supports Israel no matter what Israel does – or doesn’t do. The Israeli flag stands in most Australian Synagogues. Identity and unity are their strengths. They proudly stand beside their brothers and sisters in mutual support.
Is it surprising that pro-Palestinian Muslims do the same? Is it surprising they fight (and kill ) for the same reasons Jews do -ie. so Palestinians can live their way in their own country in peace and security? Don’t they have the same human rights that Jews insist on for themselves? Or are Palestinians a non-people who can be pushed out of their homes and off their traditional lands because Palestine is some sort of terra nullius?
It’s easy to cite many examples of double standards being employed by those trying to win the support of ordinary Australians to their side. The Jewish community is doing it, the Muslims (less successfully do it) so too are our political parties .A lot of that talk is one-eyed, consciously biased, propagandised, exaggerated/sensationalised, factually wrong, emotionally manipulative in intent or based on racial stereotypes.
The referee in these contests (our various governments) have to win (‘popular’ support), seemed focused on showing sympathy to the upset, injured or killed rather than concentrate on insisting players on both sides abide by the rules…. or else. Referees are not there to console; their core job is to ensure fair and safe play for all.
The Federal Government has trodden very softly so far. Every politician of middle rank and above raced to Bondi and competed to express the depth of their condemnation of the killings and their deepest sympathies. Our PM donned a kippah. Some pollies went to Bondi every day for a week to maximise their chance of being seen on tv as doing the right thing.
A blame game followed and quickly descended into emotional name-calling.
How was this tragedy allowed to happen? Were the police at fault for not stopping it? Did Australia’s security forces fail? Is Labor reluctant to annoy Muslims for fear of losing their votes in key electorates? Should the PM apologise?
Various players shouted ‘Look here! Look there! Indeed look anywhere to hide the obvious. The fact that few are brave enough to say, namely, while Bondi primarily happened because the shooters were ISIS ideologists. What Israel had been doing in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon and Iran can only have stiffened their resolve to kill Jews.
Before Bondi the Special Envoy on Antisemitism had already outlined stiff (if not draconian) recommendations that clearly impinged on the right to free speech. Jews were not to be critiqued, upset or challenged on university campuses, in lecture rooms or by demonstrations in the streets or even on theatre stages. After Bondi there were shrill calls for hate speech laws (although we already have them).
Everyone joined in the game, including our political Parties – and, of course, the media.
Much talk, a suite of proposed new laws, calls for stiffer penalties, polarising politics, propaganda tv specials posing as ‘documentaries’ etc. didn’t and aren’t going to quieten things down. Nor is a Royal Commission.
COOLING THINGS DOWN
Here are few ideas we might productively use to move in the direction of achieving that critical objective,STOP claiming ‘mission accomplished’ by applying quick fixes that sound good in theory but fail to work in the real world. We are inclined to grab at band-aid-solutions because they’re both easy to apply and hide the nasties beneath. We are apt to forget that band aids don’t cure cancers. No one, single ‘solution’ can ensure that Bondi “will never happen again”.
There’s been much talk of late, for example, about refusing to accept immigrants who to not sign up to ‘Australian Values’.
Again, we already have systems in place that, sort of, do that.Applicants are given a fifty-page booklet titled OUR COMMON BOND which inter alia, has sections on Australian values.
It’s a requirement for all applicants to take a multiple-choice test to prove they understand those values (and accept them). A 100% score is needed in the values section to pass the test.
All that is fine, but it is little more than nice window dressing.
From a security point of view the weakness in this approach is anyone wanting to come to this country to do harm, (commit terrorist acts, seek revenge for sins committed elsewhere, ferment division or engage in criminal activities) simply has to lie to pass the test. Fiddling around with tokenistic solutions of this kind may make our political class look like they are doing something positive, it might even win them votes, but it won’t filter out committed ‘bad guys’.
True, we have ASIO and a whole network of clandestine operators to do that. This is where Australia has to tighten up. Sounds easy, but it’s not.No matter how hard our security services try it is naive to expect that they can, or ever will, prevent Bondi like events from ever happening again.
As long as people are at war or in intense conflict and are in close proximity outbreaks of violence will occur-and innocents will be killed. The best way to minimise future violence is for everyone (the protagonists, politicians and media) to stop feeding divisive dialogue of ‘them vs us’ and ‘us vs them’ kind into the public arena. Everyone has to stop stoking the fire.
The leaders of the many multicultural elements in society must work to find ways of living together, not ways to defeat each other.
A second recommendation expands on this theme.STOP the proliferation, (and taxpayer funding of) what are essentially lobby groups for different racial groups seeking to get government to do what they want.
An example. Even though The Voice referendum failed we’ve seen the number of Voice,
Truth Telling and Treaty bodies of the Victorian (Gellung Warl) kind being formed in other Australian States. The cost of running the new Assembly in Victoria is estimated at $586 million by 2029. It will demand much more than this $ figure in treaty demands. The number of Victorians identifying as Indigenous is a little under 66,000 (around 1% of the State’s population).
All these new Indigenous bodies will, engage, dialogue, make recommendations, write reports and evaluate programmes and present them to an already large number of State and Federal departments and instrumentalities that range from the Commonwealth NIAA to individual State Police and prison departments.
It’s a huge overlapping system that so far, in spite of billions of dollars that have been spent, has achieved but modest results. Of nineteen Closing the Gap initiatives only four are on track to meet their goals. And things aren’t improving.
There is little chance the proliferation of even more, overlapping talking shops (who’ll have to demand more and more over time to justify their ongoing existence – ie. to earn their keep) will produce significantly better outcomes in a more efficient way. But there is a big chance that size of the treaty demands made will shock non Indigenous Australians to the point where a backlash will damage, not improve, relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.The establishment of the Special Envoy for Antisemitism ( followed by a Special Envoy for Islamophobia) will be far far less expensive, but they too will contribute to the building of more and more ‘silos’ whose function is to push (sorry, I meant advocate) the interests of their tribe or ethnic community.
The UK tried such a silo-approach. The results were disappointing. Over time the silos tended to become more extreme in their demands as they realised they were in competition for government attention – and always limited government funds. They tended to become more tunnel-visioned, focusing more and more on their own base’s needs and less and less on what would be better for society as a whole – and more dismissive of (or opposed to) the recommendations and demands of other silos. Communication with other silos (always low) dwindled to near zero. In short the silo approach didn’t heal, if anything it spread-and institutionalised divisiveness START thinking of ways of bringing groups in disagreement or friction together (at the same table) with the goals of (i) putting antagonists into an environment where they have to listen to each other’s viewpoints, and then (ii) rewarding them (by way of government funding, incentives etc) for developing and committing to mutually agreed upon ways to reduce frictions – ways of moving forward in harmony.
Is this pie in the sky thinking? Perhaps.But who would have thought t an Australian Muslim, an immigrant from Syria (one of Israel’s historical enemies), would risk his own life to disarm one of the two gunman murdering Jews at Bondi? Why is it impossible to imagine that leaders of the Jewish and Muslim communities could come together and work in common purpose to reduce divisions?
Such cooperation won’t be easy but it’s the only way to defuse tensions and the spreading of hatred. And surely that’s an Australian Value that’s worth supporting?
A PERTINENT ASIDE FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO CLOSE
A few words From Shakespeare’s “A Merchant of Venice” Scene 3 Act 1, Shylock’s monologue (in part).
SHYLOCK:
To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Replace the word Jew with the word Muslim or Indian …….or whatever you like. It doesn’t matter. We are all alike .